Mr. Miller, who has a stand-up special debuting next month, has become known for his right-leaning comedy. But now, he says, he’d like to ‘be just funny.’

In his stand-up comedy special, “Fake News, Real Jokes!,” which debuts on Election Day, Nov. 6,
Dennis Miller
delivers the mix of liberal-bashing and esoteric pop-culture references that have become his signature.

“For Trump to receive a warm welcome in California, he’d have to come in illegally,” he jokes in the special, a taping of a stand-up set he performed in Knoxville this past June. The performance gets plenty of laughs, as well as partisan applause, a phenomenon some comedians derisively call “clapter.”

Mr. Miller, 64, knows that many fans now come to him for his arch, right-leaning political voice. It’s a role he has pursued, with his material and the gigs he’s worked. “When you’re on the
Bill O’Reilly
Factor every week for five years, and you’re not doing much else, you’re gonna attract that audience,” he says.

But offstage, he confesses that he sometimes dreams about escaping America’s raging political divide. He laments how polarized every spoken word of public discourse has become and wonders if there still might be a patch of middle ground out there. So he’s plotting to take at least a temporary recess from politics.

“After this last special I am going to pull back more from any sort of current events stuff, and just go back to funny,” he says. “I am going to get out of the nodding applause business and back into the involuntary laughter business. I’m trying what’s called a reverse Marcel Marceau, where I imagine myself not to be in a box.”

Why now? “I don’t think you want to be the last guy suggesting we play charades at the Hatfield-McCoy cookout,” he says. “And I think that’s where the country’s at right now.”

He wants to become a regular again on late-night talk shows, where he hasn’t appeared in more than four years, and “use those seven or eight minutes to interact and be just funny. I think it’s time to reintroduce myself,” he says. “I’ve got an urge to get back in, and I don’t want to get back in in the crosshairs of the cultural scope. I’d like to use the quirky talent I have to write jokes.”

Mr. Miller—a five-time Emmy winner and former anchor of “Weekend Update” on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live”—became more right-leaning with his material after the 9/11 attacks, finding punchlines in his contempt for terrorists and distrust of liberals. The change didn’t go over well with everybody. A Seattle Post-Intelligencer review of a 2002 stand-up show he did in Seattle called him “one of the most flagrant turncoats in the history of U.S. political comedy.”

Watch a trailer for Dennis Miller’s ‘Fake News, Real Jokes’

Today, he says the perception of him isn’t entirely accurate. “I’ve always been socially liberal, and I’ve always been fiscally conservative. I’ve never trusted bad actors around the world,” Mr. Miller says.

Back in 1985, when he debuted as anchor of “Weekend Update,” he was a snarky intellectual darling. He’d open the fake newscast with music from The Clash or
Bruce Springsteen,
shake his mane of hair, and unleash a nerdy barrage of historical, literary and cultural references: the Dalai Lama, Charles Manson, Michael Jackson’s pet chimp Bubbles. He became a master of the extreme simile: his cabdriver in France didn’t merely smell bad, “the man smelled like a guy eating Gorgonzola cheese while getting a permanent inside the septic tank of a slaughterhouse.”

Mr. Miller calls his artistry in connecting arcane references “a comedic monkey trick. There are certain things that don’t stick in my mind, but the name of ‘The Jetsons’ robot maid does, for some reason,” he says.

On “SNL,” he joked about President Reagan’s age: “Seventy-five, and he has access to the button? My grandfather’s 75, we won’t let him use the remote control for the TV.” In his debut HBO special in 1988, he mocked a favorite target, the deep South: “I was in Birmingham, Alabama, at a small comedy club called ‘I Don’t Get It.’”

“Listen,” he says now. “When you’re on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ you’re gonna make fun of the powers that be, and at that time it was Reagan.”

He left “SNL” in 1991 and graduated to his own HBO talk show, “Dennis Miller Live,” from 1994 to 2002. His “Rants” on the HBO show turned in a series of best-selling books. “I’m baffled by the idea of racial prejudice. Why hate someone based on the color of their skin when, if you take time to get to know them as a human being, you can find so many other things to hate them for?” he said in one his rants.

In 2000 and 2001, he landed a gig as the designated quipster on ABC’s “Monday Night Football” broadcast team, providing commentary such as: “That hit was later than Godot.”

Between 2007 and 2015, Mr. Miller had a syndicated radio show, and he did weekly spots on Fox News’s “The O’Reilly Factor” until its cancellation in 2017. (Fox News and Mr. O’Reilly parted ways after the New York Times reported that he and Fox News had paid to resolve several harassment accusations against him over many years.
21st Century Fox
and the Journal’s parent News Corp share common ownership.)

He had amused Mr. O’Reilly with zingers like calling the Obama years “a Kardashian presidency—if you ask anybody why they like it, they don’t really know.” Mr. Miller today says he admires President Obama for taking out
Osama bin Laden.
He has done only one Fox Business show since “O’Reilly” ended.

These days he does a syndicated radio segment on Westwood One called “The Miller Minute” as well as a podcast, “The Dennis Miller Option.” He says he’s not pulling away from politics completely and will still touch on the debates of the day for those shows.

In the upcoming hourlong special—rentable from Amazon, iTunes, Google, and other video providers—Mr. Miller goes after selfies and hashtags, and political correctness. He name-checks Rasputin, old-time footballer Red Grange, and the mayor in “Jaws.” He jokes that he told the Starbucks barista he wanted to talk about race relations, but “she told me that promotion was over.”

On Nov. 7, he is slated to appear on ABC’s “
Jimmy Kimmel
Live”—his first late-night talk show appearance since June 2014, on NBC’s “Late Night with
Seth Meyers.
” He’ll appear along with actress
Melissa McCarthy.

“She’s a funny dame, and we’re gonna sit on the couch, and I’m gonna try to make her laugh her ass off,” Mr. Miller says. “I’m looking forward to Kimmel. It’ll be fun to go out and just be a comedian again.”